Wanderings in South America Part 1

Wanderings in South America.

by Charles Waterton.

INTRODUCTION.

Plutarch, the most famous biographer of ancient times, is of opinion that the uses of telling the history of the men of past ages are to teach wisdom, and to show us by their example how best to spend life. His method is to relate the history of a Greek statesman or soldier, then the history of a Roman whose opportunities of fame resembled those of the Greek, and finally to compare the two. He points out how in the same straits the one hero had shown wisdom, the other imprudence; and that he who had on one occasion fallen short of greatness had on another displayed the highest degree of manly virtue or of genius. If Plutarch's method of teaching should ever be followed by an English biographer, he will surely place side by side and compare two English naturalists, Gilbert White and Charles Waterton. White was a clergyman of the Church of England, educated at Oxford. Waterton was a Roman Catholic country gentleman, who received his education in a Jesuit college. White spent his life in the south of England, and never travelled. Waterton lived in the north of England, and spent more than ten years in the Forests of Guiana. With all these points of difference, the two naturalists were men of the same kind, and whose lives both teach the same lesson. They are examples to show that if a man will but look carefully round him in the country his every-day walk may supply him with an enjoyment costing nothing, but surpa.s.sed by none which wealth can procure; with food for reflection however long he may live; with problems of which it will be an endless pleasure to attempt the solution; with a spectacle of Infinite Wisdom which will fill his mind with awe and with a constantly increasing a.s.surance of Infinite Goodness, which will do much to help him in all the trials of life. He who lives in the country and has the love of outdoor natural history in his heart, will never be lonely and never dull.

Waterton himself thought that this love of natural history must be inborn and could not be acquired. If this be so, they ought indeed to be thankful who possess so happy a gift. Even if Waterton's opinion be not absolutely true, it is at least certain that the taste for outdoor observation can only be acquired in the field, and that this acquisition is rarely made after the period of boyhood. How important, then, to excite the attention of children in the country to the sights around them. A few will remain apathetic, the tastes of some will lie in other directions, but the time will not be lost, for some will certainly take to natural history, and will have happiness from it throughout life. No study is more likely to confirm them in that content of which a favourite poet of Waterton's truly says:-

"Content is wealth, the riches of the mind, And happy he who can that treasure find."

Gilbert White and Charles Waterton are pre-eminent among English naturalists for their complete devotion to the study; both excelled as observers, and the writings of both combine the interest of exact outdoor observation with the charm of good literature. Waterton was born on June 3rd, 1782, at Walton Hall, in the West Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re, a place which had for several centuries been the seat of his family. His father, Thomas Waterton, was a squire, fond of fox-hunting, but with other tastes, well read in literature, and delighting in the observation of the ways of birds and beasts. His grandfather, whose grave is beneath the most northern of a row of old elm trees in the park, was imprisoned in York on account of his known attachment to the cause of the Young Pretender. As he meant to join the rebel forces, the imprisonment probably saved his own life and prevented the ruin of the family. In his grandson's old age, when another white-haired Yorks.h.i.+re squire was dining at Walton Hall, I remember that Waterton and he reminded one another that their grandfathers had planned to march together to Prince Charley, and that they themselves, so differently are the rights of kings regarded at different ages, when schoolboys together, had gone a-bird's-nesting on a day, in 1793, set apart for mourning for the decapitation of Louis XVI.

Waterton has himself told the history of his earlier ancestors in an autobiography which he wrote in 1837:-

"The poet tells us, that the good qualities of man and of cattle descend to their offspring. '_Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis_.' If this holds good, I ought to be pretty well off, as far as breeding goes; for, on the father's side, I come in a direct line from Sir Thomas More, through my grandmother; whilst by the mother's side I am akin to the Bedingfelds of Oxburgh, to the Charltons of Hazelside, and to the Swinburnes of Capheaton. My family has been at Walton Hall for some centuries. It emigrated into Yorks.h.i.+re from Waterton, in the island of Axeholme in Lincolns.h.i.+re, where it had been for a very long time.

Indeed, I dare say I could trace it up to Father Adam, if my progenitors had only been as careful in preserving family records as the Arabs are in recording the pedigree of their horses; for I do most firmly believe that we are all descended from Adam and his wife Eve, notwithstanding what certain self-sufficient philosophers may have advanced to the contrary.

Old Matt Prior had probably an opportunity of laying his hands on family papers of the same purport as those which I have not been able to find; for he positively informs us that Adam and Eve were his ancestors:-

'Gentlemen, here, by your leave, Lie the bones of Matthew Prior, A son of Adam and of Eve: Can Bourbon or Na.s.sau go higher?'

Depend upon it, the man under Afric's burning zone, and he from the frozen regions of the North, have both come from the same stem. Their difference in colour and in feature may be traced to this: viz., that the first has had too much, and the second too little, sun.

"In remote times, some of my ancestors were sufficiently notorious to have had their names handed down to posterity. They fought at Cressy, and at Agincourt, and at Marston Moor. Sir Robert Waterton was Governor of Pontefract Castle, and had charge of King Richard II. Sir Hugh Waterton was executor to his Sovereign's will, and guardian to his daughters. Another ancestor was sent into France by the King, with orders to contract a royal marriage. He was allowed thirteen s.h.i.+llings a day for his trouble and travelling expenses. Another was Lord Chancellor of England, and preferred to lose his head rather than sacrifice his conscience."

Waterton's childhood was spent at Walton Hall, and in his old age he used sometimes to recall the songs of his nurses. "One of them," he said, "is the only poem in which the owl is pitied. She sang it to the tune of 'Cease, rude Boreas, bl.u.s.tering railer,' and the words are affecting:-

'Once I was a monarch's daughter, And sat on a lady's knee; But am now a nightly rover, Banished to the ivy tree.

'Crying, Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, Hoo, hoo, my feet are cold!

Pity me, for here you see me Persecuted, poor, and old.'"

He was already proficient in bird's-nesting when, in 1792, he was sent to a school kept by a Roman Catholic priest, the Reverend Arthur Storey, at Tudhoe, then a small village, five miles from Durham. Three years before his death he wrote an account of his schooldays, which is printed in the Life prefixed to Messrs. Warne's edition of his "Natural History Essays."

The honourable character of the schoolmaster, and the simple, adventurous disposition of his pupil, are vividly depicted in this account. The following quotations from it show that preparatory schools were less luxurious in the last century than they commonly are at the present day:-

"But now let me enter into the minutiae of Tudhoe School. Mr. Storey had two wigs, one of which was of a flaxen colour, without powder, and had only one lower row of curls. The other had two rows, and was exceedingly well powdered. When he appeared in the schoolroom with this last wig on, I know that I was safe from the birch, as he invariably went to Durham and spent the day there. But when I saw that he had his flaxen wig on, my countenance fell. He was in the schoolroom all day, and I was too often placed in a very uncomfortable position at nightfall. But sometimes I had to come in contact with the birch-rod for various frolics independent of school erudition. I once smarted severely for an act of kindness. We had a boy named Bryan Salvin, from Croxdale Hall. He was a dull, sluggish, and unwieldy lad, quite incapable of climbing exertions.

Being dissatisfied with the regulations of the establishment, he came to me one Palm Sunday, and entreated me to get into the schoolroom through the window, and write a letter of complaint to his sister Eliza in York.

I did so, having insinuated myself with vast exertion through the iron stanchions which secured the window; '_sed revocare gradum_.' Whilst I was thrusting might and main through the stanchions, on my way out-suddenly, oh, horrible! the schoolroom door flew open, and on the threshold stood the Reverend Mr. Storey-a fiery, frightful, formidable spectre! To my horror and confusion I drove my foot quite through a pane of gla.s.s, and there I stuck, impaled and imprisoned, but luckily not injured by the broken gla.s.s. Whilst I was thus in unexpected captivity, he cried out, in an angry voice, 'So you are there, Master Charles, are you?' He got a.s.sistance, and they pulled me back by main force. But as this was Palm Sunday my execution was obligingly deferred until Monday morning.

"But let us return to Tudhoe. In my time it was a peaceful, healthy farming village, and abounded in local curiosities. Just on the king's highway, betwixt Durham and Bishop-Auckland, and one field from the school, there stood a public-house called the 'White Horse,' and kept by a man of the name of Charlton. He had a real gaunt English mastiff, half-starved for want of food, and so ferocious that n.o.body but himself dared to approach it. This publican had also a mare, surprising in her progeny; she had three foals, in three successive years, not one of which had the least appearance of a tail.

"One of Mr. Storey's powdered wigs was of so tempting an aspect, on the shelf where it was laid up in ordinary, that the cat actually kittened in it. I saw her and her little ones all together in the warm wig. He also kept a little white and black b.i.t.c.h, apparently of King Charles's breed.

One evening, as we scholars were returning from a walk, Chloe started a hare, which we surrounded and captured, and carried in triumph to oily Mrs. Atkinson, who begged us a play-day for our success.

"On Easter Sunday Mr. Storey always treated us to 'Pasche eggs.' They were boiled hard in a concoction of whin-flowers, which rendered them beautifully purple. We used them for warlike purposes, by holding them betwixt our forefinger and thumb with the sharp end upwards, and as little exposed as possible. An antagonist then approached, and with the sharp end of his own egg struck this egg. If he succeeded in cracking it, the vanquished egg was his; and he either sold it for a halfpenny in the market, or reserved it for his own eating. When all the sharp ends had been crushed, then the blunt ends entered into battle. Thus nearly every Pasche egg in the school had its career of combat. The possessor of a strong egg with a thick sh.e.l.l would sometimes vanquish a dozen of his opponents, all of which the conqueror ultimately transferred into his own stomach, when no more eggs with unbroken ends remained to carry on the war of Easter Week.

"The little black and white b.i.t.c.h once began to snarl, and then to bark at me, when I was on a roving expedition in quest of hens' nests. I took up half a brick and knocked it head over heels. Mr. Storey was watching at the time from one of the upper windows; but I had not seen him, until I heard the sound of his magisterial voice. He beckoned me to his room there and then, and whipped me soundly for my pains.

"Four of us scholars stayed at Tudhoe during the summer vacation, when all the rest had gone home. Two of these had dispositions as malicious as those of two old apes. One fine summer's morning they decoyed me into a field (I was just then from my mother's nursery) where there was a flock of geese. They a.s.sured me that the geese had no right to be there; and that it was necessary we should kill them, as they were trespa.s.sing on our master's gra.s.s. The scamps then furnished me with a hedge-stake.

On approaching the flock, behold the gander came out to meet me; and whilst he was hissing defiance at us, I struck him on the neck, and killed him outright. My comrades immediately took to flight, and on reaching the house informed our master of what I had done. But when he heard my unvarnished account of the gander's death, he did not say one single unkind word to me, but scolded most severely the two boys who had led me into the sc.r.a.pe. The geese belonged to a farmer named John Hey, whose son Ralph used to provide me with birds' eggs. Ever after when I pa.s.sed by his house, some of the children would point to me and say, 'Yaw killed aur guise.'

"At Bishop-Auckland there lived a man by the name of Charles the Painter.

He played extremely well on the Northumberland bagpipe, and his neighbour was a good performer on the flageolet. When we had pleased our master by continued good conduct, he would send for these two musicians, who gave us a delightful evening concert in the general play-room, Mr. Storey himself supplying an extra treat of fruit, cakes, and tea.

"Tudhoe had her own ghosts and spectres, just as the neighbouring villages had theirs. One was the Tudhoe mouse, well known and often seen in every house in the village; but I cannot affirm that I myself ever saw it. It was an enormous mouse, of a dark brown colour, and did an immensity of mischief. No cat could face it; and as it wandered through the village, all the dogs would take off, frightened out of their wits, and howling as they ran away. William Wilkinson, Mr. Storey's farming man, told me he had often seen it, but that it terrified him to such a degree that he could not move from the place where he was standing.

"Our master kept a large tom-cat in the house. A fine young man, in the neighbouring village of Ferry-hill, had been severely bitten by a cat, and he died raving mad. On the day that we got this information from Timothy Pickering, the carpenter at Tudhoe, I was on the prowl for adventures, and in pa.s.sing through Mr. Storey's back kitchen, his big black cat came up to me. Whilst I was tickling its bushy tail, it turned round upon me, and gave me a severe bite in the calf of the leg. This I kept a profound secret, but I was quite sure I should go mad every day, for many months afterwards.

"There was a blacksmith's shop leading down the village to Tudhoe Old Hall. Just opposite this shop was a pond, on the other side of the road. When any sudden death was to take place, or any sudden ill to befall the village, a large black horse used to emerge from it, and walk slowly up and down the village, carrying a rider without a head. The blacksmith's grandfather, his father, himself, his three sons, and two daughters, had seen this midnight apparition rise out of the pond, and return to it before the break of day. John Hickson and Neddy Hunt, two hangers-on at the blacksmith's shop, had seen this phantom more than once, but they never durst approach it. Indeed, every man and woman and child believed in this centaur-spectre, and I am not quite sure if our old master himself did not partly believe that such a thing had occasionally been seen on very dark nights.

"Tudhoe has no river, a misfortune '_valde deflendus_.' In other respects the vicinity was charming; and it afforded an ample supply of woods and hedgerow trees to insure a sufficient stock of carrion crows, jackdaws, jays, magpies, brown owls, kestrels, merlins, and sparrow-hawks, for the benefit of natural history and my own instruction and amus.e.m.e.nt."

In 1796 Waterton left Tudhoe school and went to Stonyhurst College in Lancas.h.i.+re. It was a country house of the picturesque style of King James I., which had just been made over by Mr. Weld of Lulworth to the Jesuits expelled from Liege. The country round Stonyhurst is varied by hills and streams, and there are mountains at no great distance.

"Whernside, Pendle Hill, and Ingleboro', Three higher hills you'll not find England thoro',"

as they are described, with equal disregard of exact mensuration and of rhythm, in a local rhyme which Waterton learned. Curlew used to fly by in flocks, and the country people had also a rhyme about the curlew:-

"Be she white or be she black, She carries sixpence on her back,"

which Waterton used to say showed how our ancestors valued the bird at table.

At Stonyhurst he read a good deal of Latin and of English literature, and acquired a taste for writing Latin verse. He always looked back on his education there with satisfaction, and in after-life often went to visit the college. Throughout life he never drank wine, and this fortunate habit was the result of the good advice of one of his teachers:-

"My master was Father Clifford, a first cousin of the n.o.ble lord of that name. He had left the world, and all its alluring follies, that he might serve Almighty G.o.d more perfectly, and work his way with more security up to the regions of eternal bliss. After educating those entrusted to his charge with a care and affection truly paternal, he burst a blood-vessel, and retired to Palermo for the benefit of a warmer climate. There he died the death of the just, in the habit of St. Ignatius.

"One day, when I was in the cla.s.s of poetry, and which was about two years before I left the college for good and all, he called me up to his room. 'Charles,' said he to me, in a tone of voice perfectly irresistible, 'I have long been studying your disposition, and I clearly foresee that nothing will keep you at home. You will journey into far-distant countries, where you will be exposed to many dangers. There is only one way for you to escape them. Promise me that, from this day forward, you will never put your lips to wine, or to spirituous liquors.'

'The sacrifice is nothing,' added he; 'but, in the end, it will prove of incalculable advantage to you.' I agreed to his enlightened proposal; and from that hour to this, which is now about nine-and-thirty years, I have never swallowed one gla.s.s of any kind of wine or of ardent spirits."

After leaving college Waterton stayed at home with his father, and enjoyed fox-hunting for a while. To the end of his days he liked to hear of a good run, and he would now and then look with pleasure on an engraving which hung in the usual dining-room at Walton Hall, representing Lord Darlington, the first master of hounds he had known, well seated on a powerful horse and surrounded by very muscular hounds.

In 1802 he went to visit two uncles in Spain, and stayed for more than a year, and there had a terrible experience of pestilence and of earthquake:-

"There began to be reports spread up and down the city that the black vomit had made its appearance; and every succeeding day brought testimony that things were not as they ought to be. I myself, in an alley near my uncles' house, saw a mattress of most suspicious appearance hung out to dry. A Maltese captain, who had dined with us in good health at one o'clock, lay dead in his cabin before sunrise the next morning. A few days after this I was seized with vomiting and fever during the night. I had the most dreadful spasms, and it was supposed that I could not last out till noon the next day. However, strength of const.i.tution got me through it. In three weeks more, mult.i.tudes were seen to leave the city, which shortly after was declared to be in a state of pestilence. Some affirmed that the disorder had come from the Levant; others said that it had been imported from the Havanna; but I think it probable that n.o.body could tell in what quarter it had originated.

"We had now all retired to the country-house-my eldest uncle returning to Malaga from time to time, according as the pressure of business demanded his presence in the city. He left us one Sunday evening, and said he would be back again some time on Monday; but that was my poor uncle's last day's ride. On arriving at his house in Malaga, there was a messenger waiting to inform him that Father Bustamante had fallen sick, and wished to see him. Father Bustamante was an aged priest, who had been particularly kind to my uncle on his first arrival in Malaga. My uncle went immediately to Father Bustamante, gave him every consolation in his power, and then returned to his own house very unwell, there to die a martyr to his charity. Father Bustamante breathed his last before daylight; my uncle took to his bed, and never rose more. As soon as we had received information of his sickness, I immediately set out on foot for the city. His friend, Mr. Power, now of Gibraltar, was already in his room, doing everything that friends.h.i.+p could suggest or prudence dictate. My uncle's athletic const.i.tution bore up against the disease much longer than we thought it possible. He struggled with it for five days, and sank at last about the hour of sunset. He stood six feet four inches high; and was of so kind and generous a disposition, that he was beloved by all who knew him. Many a Spanish tear flowed when it was known that he had ceased to be. We got him a kind of coffin made, in which he was conveyed at midnight to the outskirts of the town, there to be put into one of the pits which the galley-slaves had dug during the day for the reception of the dead. But they could not spare room for the coffin; so the body was taken out of it, and thrown upon the heap which already occupied the pit. A Spanish marquis lay just below him.

"Thousands died as though they had been seized with cholera, others with black vomit, and others of decided yellow fever. There were a few instances of some who departed this life with very little pain or bad symptoms: they felt unwell, they went to bed, they had an idea that they would not get better, and they expired in a kind of slumber. It was sad in the extreme to see the bodies placed in the streets at the close of day, to be ready for the dead-carts as they pa.s.sed along. The dogs howled fearfully during the night. All was gloom and horror in every street; and you might see the vultures on the strand tugging at the bodies which were washed ash.o.r.e by the eastern wind. It was always said that 50,000 people left the city at the commencement of the pestilence; and that 14,000 of those who remained in it fell victims to the disease.

"There was an intrigue going on at court, for the interest of certain powerful people, to keep the port of Malaga closed long after the city had been declared free from the disorder; so that none of the vessels in the mole could obtain permission to depart for their destination.

"In the meantime the city was shaken with earthquakes; shock succeeding shock, till we all imagined that a catastrophe awaited us similar to that which had taken place at Lisbon. The pestilence killed you by degrees, and its approaches were sufficiently slow, in general, to enable you to submit to it with firmness and resignation; but the idea of being swallowed up alive by the yawning earth at a moment's notice, made you sick at heart, and rendered you almost fearful of your own shadow. The first shock took place at six in the evening, with a noise as though a thousand carriages had dashed against each other. This terrified many people to such a degree that they paced all night long up and down the Alameda, or public walk, rather than retire to their homes. I went to bed a little after midnight, but was roused by another shock about five o'clock in the morning. It gave the bed a motion which made me fancy that it moved under me from side to side. I sprang up, and having put on my unmentionables (we wore no trousers in those days), I ran out, in all haste, to the Alameda. There the scene was most distressing: mult.i.tudes of both s.e.xes, some nearly in a state of nudity, and others sick at stomach, were huddled together, not knowing which way to turn or what to do.

-'Omnes eodem cogimur.'

However, it pleased Heaven, in its mercy, to spare us. The succeeding shocks became weaker and weaker, till at last we felt no more of them."

A courageous sea-captain at last sailed away in safety, though chased by the Spanish brigs of war, and after thirty days at sea Waterton landed in England.

Another uncle had estates in Demerara, and in the autumn Waterton sailed thither from Portsmouth. He landed at Georgetown, Demerara, in November, 1804, and was soon delighted by the natural history of the tropical forest. In 1806 his father died, and he returned to England. He made four more journeys to Guiana, and, in 1825, published an account of them, ent.i.tled "Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, in the years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824; with original instructions for the perfect preservation of birds, &c., for cabinets of natural history." The two first journeys are now reprinted from the original text. The book at once attracted general attention, became popular, and has taken a place among permanent English literature.